Magnum P.I. season 1 Pilot Episode: "Don't Eat the Snow in Hawaii"

I used to watch this show when I was a kid and I loved every episode. I remembered John Magnum as a guy who hung around with his friends and solved mysteries and partied a lot. I didn't pick up then on how melancholy he could be, when memories of Vietnam took over his life, like in this pilot episode when one of his old army buddies is murdered whilst ostensibly smuggling cocaine into the US. Of course Magnum knows his friend would never do that, and of course no one believes him, so Magnum has to prove his friend's innocence without getting himself killed in the process. It's a good episode and a good introduction to the character, and it's a lot deeper than I gave it credit for back when I didn't understand the subtext.

"Murder, She Wrote" Pilot Episode: The Murder of Sherlock Holmes

This was a premier movie event on TV when I was a kid, and this was the first movie I've watched today that I actually got to see when I was a kid (albeit in reruns). I remember watching "Murder, she Wrote" on Sunday nights with my mom, and we both loved it. this is the pilot episode of that long-running TV series, which appeared as a two-hour TV movie event trying to launch a series (and it was successful in that regard, since the series went on for many years after that and was pretty popular). It's not rocket science or anything, it's a silly series in the "cozy mystery" sub-subgenre about an elderly lady who writes murder mysteries and just happens to have a habit of solving the real-life ones that seem to follow her around (my mom and I used to joke that it wasn't a great idea to befriend Jessica Fletcher, the main character, because most of her friends had a habit of winding up either dead or suspected of murder at some point). The show might not have been the greatest, and it''s melodramatic and cheesy at times, but it''s still a lot of fun to watch today, and this pilot episode was as much fun as I remembered. Here we get to meet the main character, see how her mystery writing career got its start, and watch her solve her first real-life murder mystery. I had a lot of fun reliving the past with this episode and I'm glad it's still just as much fun to watch Jessica Fletcher solve mysteries as it was when I was a kid.

Parents

Today's theme seems to be "movies I wanted to watch when I was a kid but my mom wouldn't let me." I grew up seeing the cover of this movie in video stores and staring at it longingly, wanting to see what the two evil looking parents depicted on the cover were up to, and why their poor son was so afraid of them, but alas, it was not to be. As I got older, my desire to watch this dissipated, because come on, it looks pretty cheesy, right? I added it to my list of movies to watch for this 80s challenge, but I started it today and I admit I wasn't expecting much.

I must say, I was happily surprised. First off, this movie is billed as a comedy (albeit a dark one) but don't let that fool you into expecting a lot of laughs. This movie is very off-kilter and disorienting and downright strange, but it's definitely more creepy and funny. The movie is so whacked out because it's told from the perspective of a little boy who's pretty whacked out, and who can blame him? He lives in the stuffy 1950s, and his parents are very stiff and straight-laced and strict with him (particularly his father, who doesn't seem to like him very much, though his mother seems loving, if not a tad bewildered by her son's strange behavior) and he doesn't really have any friends except for another girl at his new school who seems to be even stranger than he is. His parents moved him to a new town for reasons he doesn't understand, they seem to be hiding a lot of strange secrets, he's seen strange things that he's blocked out in his mind, and to top it all off, he suspects his parents of doing some unthinkable things he can't bring himself to speak out loud, even when a concerned guidance counselor at school pushes him to let it all out. It's hard to blame him for being scared. After all, if he really looks into his parent's strange activities, what will he find?

I'm kind of glad I didn't see this movie when I was a kid (that seems to be a running theme of today's movies as well) because I had my share of family secrets and creepiness when I was a kid, and I honestly think this movie would have bothered me even more back then (not that it was any picnic now...the whole experience really got under my skin). I expected this movie to be really silly, but it wasn't, it was weird and eerie, and Randy Quaid does a great job playing the menacing father here. I knew he was a good actor, especially in roles that are slightly off-center, but I didn't expect him to be this creepy. This movie was definitely worth a watch (and maybe another, and another, and another...)

RoboCop

This is another movie I really wanted to see when I was a kid. I loved cop movies, I loved robots, and look! Here was a lovely combination of the two. Of course my mom vetoed the idea of me watching it, and as controversy swirled around this movie getting an "X" rating for violence until it was toned down, I can't really blame her for that. Mostly, I held off seeing this because I figured the special effects would look really ridiculous now that I'm in my thirties, and the only reason I actually watched the movie was to see how the violence measured up to other really violent movies I'd seen.

First of all, while some of the stop-motion effects in this movie look cheesetastic now over 20 years later, to reduce the movie to a collection of outdated special effects is to do it a great injustice. The fact is, this is a really cool movie, and it's held up unbelievably well over the years. The movie tries something different right from the beginning, eschewing a lengthy explanation through title cards or something equally boring, instead choosing to throw us right into this dystopian future society with flashes of news footage our only introduction to this brave new world. In the future, life is gritty and dirty and criminals are tearing cities apart and blowing away cops right in broad daylight, and a corporation called OCP (yeah, yeah, I know, subtle) is in control, trying to utilize technology to create a super cop who will be able to stem the tide of this crime wave.

This movie takes another risk in that we get to know RoboCop before he's "robo" but we don't get to know him well, we get but a glimpse into his life before a gang of ruthless criminals exact gory revenge on him, and all we really know about him is that he's a private person, he loves his family, and he loves being a cop. It turns out that is enough for me, since I really felt for this guy (and just so you know, I don't use the word "gory" lightly here, this movie is really really REALLY nasty in some parts, and I can totally see glimmers of that X rating still lurking around the edges of this "hard R" feature). I pretty much wanted to jump into the movie and kill all the criminals myself, that's how despicable they are, and the corruption that allowed them to elude capture for so long really got under my skin. The movie had me wincing at the gore, yelling at the bad guys, and cheering RoboCop on all the way, and I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than I ever thought I would.

The Nesting

This is one of those movies I've wanted to see for years. When I was a kid, we had this direct to video feature called "Haunted Hollywood" or something like that, and it had clips from lots of different horror movies, and I watched it over and over when I was a kid because my mom wouldn't let me watch the movies themselves so seeing the clips was the next best thing for me. The clip shown from "The Nesting" was a great one. I won't spoil it, but for everyone who's seen "The Nesting," it's the part of the movie with the guy in the water and the arms. That was an awesome image when I was a kid. It haunted my dreams and thoughts every time I went swimming or wading in a pond. Based on that one clip alone, I've been obsessed with getting to see this movie someday for years now. I was worried that it would suck and thus thwart my expectations.

So did it disappoint me? The movie certainly has pacing problems. At 1 hour and 43 minutes, it's overlong and there are entire sequences that could have been cut out to make this a stronger movie. There's one scene where the dipshit main character stands in a room turning in circles for five minutes while various lines of dialogue repeat in her head. Dude, I was so pissed I wanted to fast forward the damn thing. The movie does have its charms, though. The main setting is creepy, the plot is spooky enough (when it isn't stepping on its own toes and taking too damn long to get to the point) and the lead actress isn't bad. I started out hating her, but she grew on me as the movie progressed (mostly because she either directly or indirectly caused the deaths of a bunch of people and she never seemed to broken up about it and no one seemed in any hurry to notify the police).

I can see why my mom never wanted me to watch this movie. It's pretty rapetastic, and I swear almost every male character in the film tries to rape someone at least once, not to mention most of them killed at least one person, too, and they didn't seem too bothered by this, either. what a bunch of reprobates. The sleazy nature of the characters adds another unsettling layer to the movie, and I dug it. I like it when things aren't always black and white. The movie has some serious flaws, but I have to admit, I did enjoy watching it, and after all these years, it was worth the wait.

Ghoulies

Ok, I'll be honest, I have wanted to watch this movie since I first saw the poster when I was like, six years old, because I wanted to see little monsters crawling out of the toilet and killing people (I was a disturbed child). Honestly, you probably have to be six years old to truly enjoy this schlocky crap anyway. Little did I know back then that the fake puppet-looking creatures only crawl out of a toilet once, and the rest of the movie is about a 40 year old guy with bad hair who is supposed to be the 25 year old descendant of a really stupid looking guy (also with really bad hair...must run in the family) who uses his magic powers to summon puppet creatures to do his bidding, which doesn't seem to be all that bad since the creatures don't do much but lurk around in the shadows and growl at people. They do bite the people and tear at their flesh a bit, but



SPOILER ALERT


The people all magically come back to life at the end of the movie, so it's not a big deal. Perfect horror movie for kids who don't know any better. This movie is really terrible, but it was still kind of fun to watch it and make fun of it.

Hard Lessons: The George McKenna Story

I'd never heard of this movie before, but it starred Denzel Washington (who grew a mustache for the role so he wouldn't look twelve years old...ok, I have no proof of that but it FEELS true) so I checked it out. I love inspiring teacher movies, so I thought I would like this, and I was right. This is an "inspiring principal" story more than an inspiring teacher story, but it's a good movie and had me tearing up at the end. Watch out for Richard Masur as a jerkface teacher in the school.